Web notes from Benjamin Whitmer

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From The Wrong Case by James Crumley. Crumley’s got this great, Bukowskian disdain for the world, something like Raymond Chandler meets Larry Brown. It’s a perfect fit for his irreverent, half-cocked world, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

During his more lucid moments, Simon often said that when I grew old enough to become a full-time drunk, he and I would have a worthless contest, and he maintained that I would lose because I lacked the necessary character to forgo the last vestiges of middle-class morality. “When I’m so soused that I defecate in my trousers,” he would confide in his rich, rolling, private voice, “even in you deepest stupor, boy, you will turn away in disgust. However mild, still disgust. And the man who would truly discard his life lacks that fatal disgust. And prides himself on that lack.”